Mac Lesnick - 3

Who would you like more? The loving moms or the sick babies?

     Today I got to return to one of my favorite units - the Neonatal Step-down (RBC 4)! Last summer, I shadowed in this department for a week and I absolutely loved it. All the patients are prematurely born babies who have moved across the floor from the NICU. Basically, they are the preemies that are stable enough to leave intensive care, but still have some issues that are keeping them from going home, such as: still breathing with extra oxygen, feeding through an nasogastric (ng) tube, the parents have not completed all of their preemie care classes, etc. During the first conversation I had with a mom today, she mistook me for a nurse, which I took as a huge compliment! But unfortunately I had to explain that I'm only a senior in high school doing my senior project.
     For this shift, I worked with a nurse named Joan, who has been working on that floor for about 25 years. She not only knew everything there is to know about neonatal nursing, but she was also a very funny woman. I got to hear about her entire high school career as a "super geek", as she would put it. After we got to know each other while she was feeding a baby, it was time to get to the busy part of the day. Although my day started out with lots of paperwork, it was great because that meant that Joan and I would get to discharge a baby today! I love seeing a mom's face when she is told that her baby, who most likely hasn't left the hospital for more than a month, gets to go home. Her eyes light up and she has a huge smile on their face for the rest of the day. Later in the day, another baby needed an ultrasound on her brain, so Joan and I took the baby and her mom down to the basement to the Radiology department. The radiologist we were with was not only incredibly smart, explaining each part of the ultrasound picture and what the different areas of the brain were, but he was also very funny. He made lots of jokes and carried on some hilarious conversations with the three of us as we watched him work. After we came back up to RBC 4, the same mom I was talking about in the beginning was asking me all sorts of questions about nursing, college, etc. One of her questions stood out to me. She asked me how I could want to work in a place like RBC 4 or the NICU with so many incredibly sick babies. So I thought about this question for a moment and then explained to her that its probably every nurse's dream to be discharging patients all day, and I want to help even the most critical patients make it out of the hospital. I want to see enormous smiles on those babies' parents when they leave the unit for home after being told that their baby had a less than 50% chance of survival. After explaining, I thanked the mom and told her that she just helped me answer the question to my senior thesis.